Turn off hibernation and save a ton of disk space!

While trying to install iOS 5 on my devices tonight, I got a surprise error - Ran out of disk space! Not the iPhone storage, but my actual OS HDD had filled up. I've been running with this 80GB SSD for a few years now and only use it for the OS and installed programs. Music, pictures, and all other data goes on a RAID 1 array. The largest things on the OS disk are the various iOS backups that iTunes creates. So what gives? 

After uninstalling a ton of relatively small programs, I noticed this guy hanging out in the root of that drive.

Ah ha! A nearly 12GB hidden file named 'hiberfil.sys'. Needless to say, this was clearly a giant cache that the system can use to get in and out of hibernation quickly. Well, I don't hibernate, so get that outta my face bro. A quick ping of the Google machine yielded the answer to how to turn hibernation off, and just like that, I got a bunch of space back. 11.9GB to be exact. Didn't even need to reboot.

Another way to free up a couple GB is to blow out any extraneous iOS backups from iTunes.

I blew out the two updates from 9/8 (it's 10/13 as I write this), freeing up about 1GB. I could have also blown away the other backup for the 3GS i'm using as an alarm clock because, come on, it's an alarm clock. It's unfortunate you can't point these backups to another location, say a giant data drive, but for most people it shouldn't be a big deal.

It's a little sad to be running out of HDD space in 2011, but hey, I'm using an SSD and am carefully partitioning the OS stuff and the bulk storage stuff between drives. I suppose it's time to upgrade to a larger OS drive soon though.